26 July 2015 1:37 PM

Eric Metaxas is an American broadcaster and author (notably of a biography of the German pastor and anti-Hitler resistance hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer). He is also an organiser of debates and public discussions(usually in New York City) under the ambitious but enjoyable title 'Socrates in the City'. Last week , as part of this programme of public events, he came to Oxford and interviewed me (among others) in the very evangelical church of St Aldate's .Here, in two podcasts, is the result. It covers quite a few subjects but is based on my reent book'The Rage Against God'. Some of you may be interested. Some of you may not.

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23 July 2015 4:42 PM

What a lot of twaddle we have had to read and listen to about a silly, meaningless film of Royal children giving the Hitler salute. Our understanding of the Hitler era, and of the war that followed, actually seems to get poorer as the years go by. The left-wing fantasy that the British upper classes were in some way Nazi sympathisers is somehow inescapable. No doubt a few boobies were initially taken in. Many others saw something admirable about the German revival, failing to notice, or hiding from themselves, the evil aspects of National Socialism. But the numbers who remained pro-German once war was certain were tiny. I am not sure this could be said of Soviet sympathisers (see below), who opposed the war against Hitler until 1941.

Many open-minded British people in the 1920s, including the (then) Communist sympathiser Graham Greene, thought Germany had been harshly and unjustly treated at Versailles. Winston Churchill famously had a few good words to say about the early years of Hitler as a national leader and a reviver of his country. Personally, I like to think (though I cannot know) that I would have realised from the first what sort of person Hitler was. I think it would probably have been quite difficult to do.

What is fashionable now was of course unfashionable then. This is a thought that one needs to retain in one’s mind when considering Atticus Finch in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. When it was fashionable to be racially bigoted and to ignore justice for that reason, Finch courageously resisted fashion. Now that it is fashionable to be unbigoted, Finch is somehow reclassified as a bigot, by people who might well have accepted the nasty conventional wisdom of 1935, had they been there at the time. The orthodox are always orthodox, whatever the orthodoxy is.

But the Left has always sought to divert attention from its own almost universal admiration for Stalin, which continued long after the crimes of the Bolsheviks had been exposed by émigré revelations, by alleging a matching admiration for Hitler on the right. There’s also the misrepresentation of the Chamberlain policy of appeasement as being motivated by some sort of sympathetic softness towards Hitler. Does Winston Churchill’s later much greater appeasement of Stalin (firmly backed by his Labour and Liberal coalition partners) represent sympathy with Stalinist Communism? I do not think so. Both Chamberlain and Churchill were motivated by what appeared at the time to be realistic common sense, at the time. I also have to add at this point that the British and French Left had no great enthusiasm for the rearmament which both countries rather belatedly embarked on , once they realised that a war in Europe was inevitable.

On the contrary, the Labour Party was voting against Defence Estimates and conscription as late as the Spring of 1939, and the French Communists (who after the Stalin-Hitler pact regarded war with Hitler as ‘imperialist’ and thus not worthy of support) may well have been responsible for the demoralisation of the French Army in 1939-40. The myth of the ‘Guilty Men’, and of British ruling-class sympathy for the Nazis, dies hard.

All of which brings me to the actual subject of this posting, the newly-released (in Britain) film ’13 Minutes’, about Georg Elser, who in November 1939 came very close to assassinating Adolf Hitler, but whose extraordinary lone action is little-known and little-celebrated, in his own country or abroad – in sharp contrast to the Stauffenberg Plot of nearly five years later, which is so well-known that it has even attracted the notice of Hollywood.

’13 Days’ is not a Hollywood production. Its title in German is ‘Elser – er hatte die Welt verandert’ (forgive my failure to include the important umlauts) which means ‘Elser – he would have changed the World’ (My thanks to PJS and others for corrcting my rudimentary and forgotten German. Though I haven't studied the language since I was 13, I really ought to have worked it out for myself). The Director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, was also responsible for ‘Downfall’, the tremendous film about the last days of Hitler in his bunker, whose scene of Hitler driving away the truth with molten rage has been abused in many a subtitled spoof.

It is almost as good as ‘Downfall’ and in some ways better. Its portrayal of the assassin himself is far from straightforward hero-worship, with an (often but not always) selfish and troubled personal life , though most will still come out of the film full of admiration for his act of lonely, righteous, morally-complicated courage.

Very little dramatic tension is squeezed out of the attempted killing itself. After all, we know already that it failed and the most potent part of the story (unlike in the fictional 'Day of the Jackal’) lies in what happened to the would-be assassin after he is caught.

Elser was an accomplished and inventive craftsman, who, entirely on his own, designed an efficient and powerful time bomb, stole the detonators and explosives from various workplaces, and very cleverly and patiently concealed it in a pillar close to where he knew Hitler would make his annual speech to former party comrades in the BurgerBraukeller in Munich. It really ought to have succeeded. Had it done so, I suspect few would remember the innocents who did undoubtedly perish as a result, history being what it is. History would of course be wrong to do so, and if anyone thinks that assassination is morally simple, even when Hitler is involved, let them consider the Munich waitress, blown to pieces, and her bereaved family. If it is true (and I strongly suspect it may be ) that we cannot do evil that good may come, can the great evil of Hitler(much of it unknown and undone in November 1939) overcome that problem? You tell me. Elser, who returned strongly to his Christian faith in the weeks before he acted, plainly worried about the matter. At one point, broken down by torture and despair, he tells his interrogators (in the film, I do not know if he actually said this) that he now fears that his action was wrong, because it did not succeed, the implication being that God had not wanted it to succeed. How he coped with the rest of his life, I cannot imagine. He was never tried. Instead he was kept in special zones of Sachsenhausen (near Berlin) and Dachau (near Munich) concentration camps until he was murdered by the SS (his death falsified as the result of a bombing raid) . Thus led to (baseless) claims that the whole thing was a put-up job, designed to make it look as if Hitler was guarded by providence in which he had been a Gestapo catspaw. The inability of people to believe that he had acted alone would always be a problem.

As in the later failed attempts to kill Hitler, recounted by Alan Clark in his superb ‘Barbarossa’, there is something rather diabolical about the fact that Hitler escaped what would otherwise have been certain death by just 13 minutes, leaving the hall earlier than expected to catch a train (he had meant to fly back to Berlin, but fog was threatened, so he decided to take the train). Hence the English-language title of the film.

His arrest, thanks to an astonishingly clumsy attempt to sneak across the Swiss border at Konstanz, led swiftly to his detention and interrogation (his pockets were full of evidence pointing towards his involvement) .

The film subjects us to part of that interrogation. Grim as it is, it does not begin to replicate the savagery of the real thing, which left Elser beaten until he was almost unrecognisable, with his eyes bulging out of his appallingly swollen face (we know this because the Gestapo brought members of his family to see him during the questioning) . Heinrich Himmler is said to have taken part personally in the interrogation – mainly designed to get Elser to confess to working for the British secret service, or some other outside force. Hitler could not believe he had acted on his own, none of his close associates had the courage to contradict this belief, and so Elser had to be compelled, by hideous methods, to agree with Hitler. Except that he would not do so. This is totalitarianism in action. How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?

During this ghastly process (imagine making a full and truthful confession, and finding yourself then surrounded by cruel , violent all-powerful men who refuse to believe you and want you to say something else), the camera indicates all too clearly what is going to happen, and what has happened, but does not, I am glad to say, actually show it happening. Like the female Gestapo stenographer, we are spared the worst but horribly aware that it is taking place.

Intercut with this muted horror are scenes from Elser’s former rather rackety life in a Germany rapidly descending into barbarism. I have seldom seen this process better portrayed, as it takes place in a small, poor town ( I believe the handsome town of Weidenberg, in Upper Franconia, is used for most of the scenes, though much of the film seems to have been shot in the South Tyrol, that strange anomaly, a piece of Austria lost at Versailles that Hitler never demanded back, out of gratitude to Mussolini – Hitler had intended eventually to resettle its German-speaking people in … Crimea, long coveted by German expansionists).

The organised harassment of churchgoing Christians by the Hitler Youth, busily singing insulting anti-Christian songs, portrayed here, will come as a bit of a surprise to those who are convinced that National Socialism was a Christian enterprise. The pressure on all normal people to compromise with the Party and regime is also shown in a convincing way – private neutrality simply wasn’t an option in such places. Even the way you said ‘hullo’ in the pub or at work marked you out. And the idea of Germans as uniform, subservient conformists is also dealt a bit of a blow – though it’s sadly true that Elser’s family were treated as unpatriotic pariahs in postwar, liberated Germany, whose conversion into a liberal, tolerant open society wasn’t exactly instant.

There’s a startling and rather horrifying postscript, concerning one of Elser’s interrogators which I won’t say any more about here.

You’ll swiftly forget that the film is subtitled. Like ‘the Lives of Others’, ‘Good Bye Lenin’ and of course ‘Downfall’, this is an absorbing and thoughtful film which will stay with you long afterwards. Being foreign and subtitled, it will of course be difficult to see unless you live in the sort of place that has an arthouse cinema. Once that would have been that, now, there’ll be a DVD.

It’ll tell you much, much more about Hitler, Germany , morality, terror, history and truth than any number of films of little girls doing mock Hitler salutes in long-ago London gardens.

12 April 2015 12:10 AM

I recently visited a ‘head shop’, one of many totally legal establishments now flourishing on British high streets, where users of officially illegal drugs may buy the equipment they need to enjoy their criminal habit.

I didn’t buy anything. But one of the items on sale was a wall-clock, especially designed to be used to store drugs. ‘Hide your stash in plain sight!’ said the little poster next to it.

It is good advice. If you really want to conceal something, leave it lying about where everyone can see it.This is what the Prime Minister has done with his supposed promise to hold a referendum on British membership of the European Union.

The dishonest trick at the heart of the offer is so blazingly obvious that nobody notices it.Let me explain. If Mr Cameron really believed that he would win a parliamentary majority on May 7, he would not make this promise.

He loves the EU so much that he has said that he wants to extend it to the Ural mountains. He absolutely does not want this country to leave it.

But because Mr Cameron knows perfectly well that he will not win such a majority, and that no possible coalition partner or ally would support such a referendum, he feels safe to make a pledge that will never be redeemed.

The purpose of the pledge is to win back some of those voters he and his Blairite friends have long derided as fruitcakes and closet racists. He despises them, but he wants their support to ensure that the Tories are the largest party, and that he stays in office.It would be disastrous for him if they all took him too literally. He needs some of them, but not all of them.

This is perhaps why the Tory Party’s campaign is so crude, narrow and awful, almost designed to repel thinking and decent people.

The interesting thing about all this is that it is so blatant, yet nobody seems to notice it, just as they don’t notice the perilous state of our economy (another disastrous balance of payments deficit was announced last week). And just as it is obvious that, while we are supposed to have ‘tough’ and ‘draconian’ laws on drugs, shops which help people take drugs thrive all over the country. I sometimes wonder if, one dark and tear-stained morning, all these many lies will be brutally exposed in one dreadful awakening.

Winning at any cost? It's the only Game in town

When I rather guiltily read the books on which the TV series Game Of Thrones is based, I was struck by one thing. The whole point of this saga is that ruthlessness pays, that evil generally wins, that justice is non-existent, and utter cynicism the only wisdom. It is the Middle Ages without the saving grace of Christianity.

The whole idea is symbolised by the ghastly Iron Throne for which the various factions and clans compete, and which, once gained, eats into the souls of all who sit on it.

I won’t watch the TV version because I very much do not want to see a slick and well-acted portrayal of such foul behaviour. But the success of this drama suggests that this sort of merciless immorality now has a wide and receptive audience. Gleeful, unembarrassed ruthlessness, once rightly kept in check, has become normal among us, and Game Of Thrones is a success because this change is now more or less complete.

Political campaigning has played its part in this. I first noticed really dirty tricks in the 1997 campaign, when New Labour screened a particularly vile anti-Tory broadcast personally mocking Tory politicians and conference representatives, and falsely alleging a plan to ‘abolish the old age pension’.

Once, this sort of thing was left to underlings and backstairs-crawlers who could be disowned. But now it seems to have become central. The Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, is a senior Cabinet Minister and an experienced grey head in the Tory Party. I rather like him. But his outburst against Ed Miliband, accusing him of stabbing his brother in the back, and planning to do the same to the country, was a departure from the old rules of gentlemanly combat.

It was also inaccurate, as Mr Miliband stabbed his brother in the front, openly campaigning against him in an election – more than can be said for the Tories, who deviously overthrew Iain Duncan Smith in a cruel and personalised putsch.

But perhaps the most tricky and ruthless political act of the week came from the Blair creature, who ‘supported’ Mr Miliband on the European issue. How can this ghastly, discredited man not know that his kiss is the kiss of death? Of course he does. Compared with Blair’s embrace, a stab in the back would be an act of kindness.

You shouldn't make it up

The story of how the young Princess Elizabeth and her sister Margaret mingled incognito with VE Night revellers is a moving and very British episode.

So why must the makers of a new film, claiming to be about the event, fabricate falsehoods about the King’s daughters going to brothels and gambling dens, and Princess Margaret getting drunk?

I suppose that having got away with the multiple untruths in The King’s Speech, the movie industry felt that invention was better box office than truth. And yes, I know Shakespeare made things up, too. But this stuff isn’t Shakespeare.

The devastating attack no one heard

In a grown-up campaign, last week’s attack on David Cameron by a former British ambassador to Syria would have been devastating. As it is, it seems to have passed almost without notice.

Here’s a flavour of the indictment levelled by Peter Ford, Our Man in Damascus from 2003 to 2006. ‘If Cameron had his way, the jihadists could have been in control of Damascus by now,’ and, ‘To call for the overthrow of the secular Syrian government, to demonise it out of all proportion… to predict its imminent fall… and then to wail as though it was nothing to do with them when British Muslims set off to help hasten said overthrow is inconsistent and nonsensical.’

I couldn’t agree more, and still can’t understand how he gets away with it. Meanwhile, Mr and Mrs Cameron go around the country eating bacon sandwiches and hot dogs with knives and forks to avoid embarrassing photos.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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06 April 2015 3:31 PM

One of the great unsolved mysteries of modern British history is the real reason for the Cultural Revolution which, in an amazingly short time, changed Britain from one country into another, where the remnants of the former nation can increasingly be found only by a sort of archaeology, so brief is human memory.

One of the most moving descriptions of a moment in this change is in my brother’s memoir ‘Hitch-22’ in which he recalls a summer twilight in Cambridge when the Leys School’s apology for a ‘pop group’, as they were then called, held a concert in the grounds. Attracted by the amplified noise – teenagers from the town slipped into the school grounds to listen. In those days you didn’t walk through gateways marked ‘private’, and public schoolboys didn’t mix with the town.

To me the account (I wasn’t there. I suspect it must have been the summer of 1964, before I began my brief period as a public schoolboy) is especially evocative. The former quietness of England was being rapidly invaded in those times, by the incessant whoosh and sigh of cars on the bypass, and by the rapid encroachment of loud popular music into workplaces and public places. I can fix a summer holiday in the Isle of Wight to September 1961, because of a completely clear memory of that very strange and quite unforgettable song ‘Johnny, Remember Me’ being played over the loudspeakers of the car ferry between Cowes and Southampton as we waited by our Morris Minor 1000 for a delayed homeward departure.

Were they transmitting Radio Luxembourg, or were they playing the actual record, number one in the charts for weeks that summer, to try to pacify the disgruntled passengers? I have no idea, but the radio had very little time, back in 1961, for modern popular records. If you wanted to listen to them, you had to buy them from quaint shops which allowed you to listen to them free through headphones, before parting with your seven shillings and fourpence for a 45 rpm ‘single’(the main song and the 'flipside', generally but not always forgettable), as distinct from an ‘EP’, which cost about ten bob, had a proper stiff cover and featured four songs, or an ‘LP’, which cost thirty two shillings and sixpence and had to be played at 33 rpm, later known as an ‘album’. These prices remained the same for years, until Reggie Maudling abolished resale price maintenance (also confusingly referred to as ‘rpm’) during the dying months of the 1951-64 Tory government

Similarly, I can place a holiday in Jersey in 1963 (I’d otherwise have thought it was two years later) because the evenings were rent by the repeated playings of ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ in what passed for the nightclubs of Gorey, the urgent, meaningless refrain drifting out over the summer sea.

Just as Oxford spring mornings are unique, providing a last faint hint of the medieval celestial city amid river and woodland described by Gerard Manley Hopkins in ‘ Duns Scotus’s Oxford ‘

….Cambridge summer evenings are also unique, haunted, soft and mysterious, equally in direct touch with a remote past which still persists despite all attempts to drown it out.

That little grey town (as J.B. Priestley calls it ‘The Good Companions’) is not like anywhere else I have ever visited or lived, and to this day I cannot go there without feeling I have stepped slightly outside normal time. It was also the place in which, for me, the ‘Sixties’ ended. Their strange, delusional atmosphere continued long after December 31st 1969 . I will never forget the lovely sun-dappled afternoon I spent on 6th October 1973, punting on the Cam and taking the train back to London, exhausted and happy as one is after a day on the river, to discover abruptly that the Yom Kippur war had broken out, that Egypt and Syria had launched a joint surprise attack on Israel.

This was a real war whose outcome was far from certain, which might spread far wider, and which was bound to have (and did have) huge effects on our economy and on the supply of oil to the western nations. The news instantly dispelled my euphoria, and filled me with a feeling of darkness and cold, entirely justified (as I now know) by the revolutionary change it wrought in relations between the ‘West’ and Saudi Arabia. Not that I would now want to, but I have never recovered the feeling of security and inviolability that I last felt on that afternoon. I suspect that my apostasy from Marxism, which took place soon afterwards, began that day.

But let us go back to the insistent drum-beat of the 1960s. In that decade, the tension between Cambridge’s ordinary inhabitants and the various educational institutions that stood in their midst must have been very great. The University was still, just, clinging to the old ways .There were ‘undergraduates’ and ‘Varsity’ rather than ‘students’ and ‘uni’ (I can remember an actual Rag Day in the autumn of 1965 , with undergraduates in silly costumes standing perilously in the empty niches 20 feet above the street on the stone façade of (I think) Corpus Christi college .

Most of the time they dressed in sports jackets and wore ties (most of them were male), they all rode bicycles with baskets, and some of them even smoked pipes. Dons were still (just) ‘in loco parentis’ (in the place of the parent) and the age of majority was 21. My Methodist boarding school was, likewise, still more or less upholding the Edwardian traditions of the public school, with a lengthy rule book, enforced by the writing of lines (‘Few things are more distressing to a well-regulated mind than to see a boy, who ought to know better, disporting himself at improper moments’, transgressors had to write, 20 times, before breakfast, in a large high-ceilinged pre-1914 classroom built to commemorate the Coronation King George V.

There was also ‘gating’ - the withdrawal of the (already limited) freedom to leave the school grounds unsupervised. This was a term I’d read about in ’Billy Bunter’ stories in which boys said things like 'yaroo' and leggo', and 'you beast', and was amazed to find still in use in the 1960s. Oddly enough, the most serious offence in the whole canon of school punishments was being late for breakfast. Commit this offence twice in one term , and you were gated. You could be late for anything else three times before being gated, and you could commit general crimes or misdemeanours of dress, deportment or behaviour five times before being so confined.

Given that we were on the southern edge of one of the most beautiful and history-steeped places on the planet, the school had an almost obsessive interest in keeping us away from it. Even by the very different standards of the time this rule was considered so odd that it was given a special mention in a Fabian Siociety pamphlet attacking the public schools of the day.

At the top of the library staircase was a map of the town on which the hand of authority had drawn a thick black line, across which we were not supposed to venture without permission except on Sundays and (for some forgotten reason) Wednesday afternoons. Being a barrack-room lawyer and column-dodger by nature, I swiftly spotted that the line did not extend all the way to the edge of the map, and so I would legalistically ride my clanking red bicycle round the top of it on forbidden days, happy to point out (if challenged, as I never was) that I had not actually broken the rules.

But, yet again, I digress. This is all by way of introduction to a recommendation of ‘The Neophiliacs’. By Christopher Booker, which I recently re-read (The first time I read it, I borrowed it from the Swindon public library. My new copy was personally supplied by the author) after a gap of about 40 years. Alongside Bernard Levin’s ‘The Pendulum Years’, I much recommend it to those who would understand the 1960s upheaval.

Mr Booker’s work is more reflective and less bitterly-enraged than Mr Levin’s. It is crammed with quiet but devastating mockery of the obsession with ‘youth’ and ‘grittiness’ and ‘abrasiveness’ and novelty in general which took hold of the BBC , the media and, increasingly, of politics and the law, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. These obsessions eventually took the form of a sort of large waking dream, of novelty and change in which we are the heroes of the new order, from which we were repeatedly rather roughly awakened by reality. Booker uses the term ‘a froth of expectation’, which accumulated on top of many real moral and material changes, not all of them for the better, which were actually taking place in the economy and society.

The book is heavily influenced by the thinking of Carl Jung, who long ago warned of ‘psychic epidemics’ by which man periodically devastates the settled order.

If I have understood the argument rightly, these epidemics are rooted in our power of imagination. This power, undisciplined by any deeper understanding of the universe, will often impel us into a sort of dreamworld of impossible, utopian hopes. War and catastrophe - or decline, and the stultifying nature of conservative societies dominated by the old and middle-aged - stimulate it in certain directions. Powerful new trends in thought, literature, music and the widespread use of drugs carry that stimulus further. It seems to me that a religious longing, without a religion to satisfy it, may have much to do with this. I would say that, wouldn’t I? But Jung seems to sympathise with this view too.

In one of the epigraphs to Chapter 12, Booker significantly quotes Jung on the religious question ‘…among all my patients in the second half of life, - that is to say, over thirty-five - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort is not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook'.(C.G. Jung, Psychotherapists or the Clergy’).

One particular moment of rough awakening from a dream was the Moors Murder Trial . I think I have written before about the effects of this on serious liberal opinion, as shown in Pamela Hansford Johnson’s account of the trial ‘On Iniquity’ and in her husband C.P.Snow’s fictionalised reflection on it, in his novel ‘The Sleep of Reason’. I recommend both books, taken pretty much together. Snow’s imagined trial of a pair of sexually-motivated child-murderers is one of the best things he ever wrote, containing several moments of real horror, rage and misery all the more potent for being so understated.

A forgotten element of this event (now) is that there was no doubt at the time of the connection between Brady’s taste for pornography and the crimes he then committed (The Fleet Street reporters who attended the trial and had to listen to the recordings of Brady and Myra Hindley doing what they did, recordings these murderers themselves had made, never got over it, hard-bitten old reptiles that they were).

As Booker writes : ‘For the child murders by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley had shaken the nation as had no crime since the war. With its mixture of Brady’s background as an illegitimate orphan in the slums of Glasgow, and the fantasy world of Sadism and Nazism he had been able to seize on through the offices of Manchester’s thriving pornographic bookshops, for many people the case threw into sharp relief the darker side of the dream into which Britain had been moving’.

That dream involved a thoroughgoing rejection of former authority, but without any replacement for what was rejected.

Booker suggests that ‘In order to become mature, in short, we must not only reject the authority of our parents – but, at the same time, in order to replace them, we must also learn to kill off our own fantasy selves. Only by killing this fantasy self can a man become fully mature. Unless he does so, he is still in a state of rebellion, a perpetual state of immaturity’.

This seems to me to describe rather well the generation of perpetual adolescents, balding bejeaned Glastonbury-goers in their sixties, with drug stashes in the high cupboards of their expensive London houses, still in imaginary combat with a crusty establishment which ceased to exist 60 years ago (but which they imagine to be embodied by Margaret Thatcher or that monster, ‘The Mail’.

Booker writes, rather disturbingly for any modern person: : ‘Ultimately , to overcome his own fantasy-self is the one supreme contribution that a man can make to mankind. All the fantasies that are around us, that infect the collective human organism, are in the end just one fantasy, made up of all the separate unresolved images and acts of self-assertion that are fed into it form each individual fantasy-self of all the thousands of millions of human beings on earth.

‘Every man who asserts his own ego against the general framework in any way, however small, or adds to the sum of unresolved imagery, however idly, is playing his tiny part in increasing the sum of the world’s discords and miseries…’

He contrasts this with the more commonly-accepted Freudian orthodoxy ‘the supreme expression of that profound revolt against the ‘father-figures’ of Victorianism, tradition and religion which sprang up in the late 19th century, lay in its uncovering of all the temptations to violation of order which comprise the dream-fantasy level of the mind. But instead of recognising them as imperatives of the way the mind must *not*work. Freud interpreted them as symptoms of ‘inhibition’ and ‘repression’, which must be cleared away , in order that the individual may fulfil himself. It would be hard to find a clearer example than this basic confusion of the self-destructive urge at work in the 20th-centrury subconscious.

And he concludes:

‘However much one wishes to change the outside world, the only thing one can change or have any control over is ultimately oneself. Which is why the greatest good any man can do to change the world is the least dramatic act of all – to withdraw his own contribution from the general sum of evil’ . Which is as good a point as any to end this sermon on Easter Monday.

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13 June 2014 3:21 PM

Will any lessons be learned from the disaster now unfolding in what used to be Iraq? I doubt it. The interventionists still seem quite unable to see that it was their intervention that brought this about, and that their utopia, like all others, can only ever be approached across a sea of blood, and then you never get there.

Such people will continue to scan the world, looking for places in which to do good, in which they will actually, quite unintentionally, end up by doing the most terrible harm . What motivates this desire? Why does it go so wrong?

I think it’s obviously a sort of displacement, and a good impulse, denied its proper course searching to find a way out.

We know that we ought to try to do some sort of good in our lives, even to try to be good. But the old devotional and pious approaches to this, personal self-examination, confession of our own misdeeds, self-control and self-reproach, all underpinned by ideas of God, sin, repentance and grace, are now regarded as completely absurd. They are so unfashionable and outmoded that even to attempt them is to court mockery, or dismissal as some sort of eccentric survival, a human coelacanth swimming on alone in the depths, living on long past its proper time, with no shoal to call its own.

Also dismissed by modern thought is the idea of man as a created being, with a special purpose. He has been replaced by a malleable, reformable being who has no unchanging nature. So he can (in theory, though of course not in practice, as we saw yet again in the 'Arab Spring') be changed by vast utopian projects, whether Trotskyist or (Trotskyism's close cousin) neoconservative. And with the destruction of that kind of man has come the destruction of what used to be viewed as common sense, so that the more radically in conflict an idea may be with common sense, the more it is respected.

And so has come the idea of the social conscience - of doing good not in minute particulars, for which we have no time and which are too small when set against the vast size of such problems as ‘child poverty’ or ‘colonialism’ or ‘exploitation’ or ‘racism’: but in grandiose gestures, often involving other people’s money (which we spend) and other people’s children (whom we send out to kill, or arrange to have killed) .

And then of course there are all the disappointed sixties revolutionaries, whose great cause evaporated amid unexpected prosperity and the computer revolution, and the disappointed Cold Warriors, who have no threat from which to defend us now that the Evil Empire has gone.

They too need a place in which to store their noble impulses.

And gosh, look, an attractive and terribly committed young woman on the television is telling us of woe and injustice in some corner of the world we’d never heard of an hour ago, have never visited and never will visit. And it becomes a moral imperative to intervene, and do good. And all those who oppose such intervention are callous and heartless.

And we do do good, a lot of good, to ourselves and our unquiet consciences. Or, if we don’t do any actual good, we feel as if we have.

And that’s what matters, isn’t it? How we feel? After all, what other measure could there possibly be?

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18 May 2014 12:01 AM

Tax is a necessary nuisance, not a moral duty. It is not, as the Leftists chant, ‘the price we pay for a civilised society’. It is the price we pay for handing over too many of our responsibilities to the State.

A huge amount of it is wasted. Tremendous sums are simply squandered on debt interest, in many cases paying for failed or useless schemes of long ago.

It does terrible damage to the economy, shrivelling the rewards for hard work and diverting wealth into the wrong hands.

It falls very heavily on the poor, especially in the form of indirect taxes such as VAT.

In my view, our whole attitude to it is wrong, and well summed up by the fact that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs seldom if ever say ‘please’ when they demand our money and never say ‘thank you’ when they get it.

I am told by people who have paid too much tax that HMRC can even be aggressive about telling them that. And now there is this plan to let them seize money from private bank accounts without a court hearing.

These are the methods and attitudes of a haughty autocracy, not those of a public service in a free country. The current frenzy against ‘Tax Avoidance’ is churned up by a government that cannot control its spending or its borrowing and so is frantic to grab all the money it can get, without worrying too much about how.

It is sad to see people joining in a campaign that will eventually hurt them too. We should remember that our money belongs to us, not to the State.

I barely know who Gary Barlow is and care less. I cannot imagine that he really deserves to be as rich as he is. Nobody does.

But the people who choose to buy his music intend their hard-earned money to go to Gary Barlow, not to George Osborne.

Think about it. If George Osborne went on a national tour and sold copies of his speeches, he would be hard put to make a hundred pounds.

Only one thing allows him to seize Gary Barlow’s money. It is the law. And Mr Barlow is quite entitled to use the law to hang on to as much of his money as he can.

If the courts decide that his investment scheme isn’t allowed, then the law says he must pay up.

But there is no shame in trying to keep his tax as low as possible (in fact I’ve yet to meet a well-off media Left-winger who wasn’t doing his utmost to keep his own tax bill down).

And the idea that he should be stripped of his OBE, as if he were a criminal, is a grave misunderstanding of what a free country is, and of what the law is for.

Here is the best reason for voting UKIP

I don't like UKIP or its leader, Nigel Farage. They are the Dad’s Army of British politics, doddery, farcical and very unclear about what they are actually for.

But they have Captain Mainwaring’s virtues too. They are absolutely certain about what they are against, in this case an aloof political establishment that despises the concerns of normal human beings.

They are also indomitable when under attack. And they need to be. I have taken a close interest in British politics since I was a schoolboy, and I have never seen a more disgraceful alliance between politicians and their media toadies than the one that has been secretly made to do down UKIP.

On one day last week, almost every unpopular newspaper carried a cartoon portraying Nigel Farage as ugly, stupid or embattled, or all three.

Last Wednesday, the insider magazine Private Eye also claimed that the Leftist daily The Guardian had made a secret deal with the Tory Party, which claims to be conservative.

The Tories, it was alleged, had promised the favourite newspaper of the liberal elite a steady supply of damaging stories about UKIP candidates saying daft things (Tories, of course, never say daft things). In return, the newspaper had promised to avoid identifying the source.

Such stories are immediately picked up by BBC radio and TV news channels, which view The Guardian as sacred text. Asked about the allegation, The Guardian drew itself up to its full height and snapped: ‘The Guardian does not disclose its sources.’ (A certain Sarah Tisdall, who went to prison 30 years ago after The Guardian handed over documents that disclosed her as its source, might disagree.)

Well, there you have it. The Tory Party and The Guardian (and the BBC) are all united against UKIP. That would seem the best possible reason to vote UKIP. It also tells you who and what the Conservative Party really is.

The Prime Minister keeps saying he wants the Chilcot Report into the Iraq fiasco to be published. I can’t believe that the head of the British Government cannot force the publication of this document if he really wants to. There is no acceptable excuse for any further delay, and if it isn’t released soon we’ll have to assume that Mr Cameron is pretending and doesn’t really mean what he says.

What a mess we are in about the ‘N’ word. Of course some people still use it to insult and demean. There are not many of them, but they are cruel and wicked.

Others, still bigoted in their hearts, take an unpleasant joy in its rare survival in our culture (as the name of a dog) in The Dam Busters. It is because of such people that I sympathise with TV stations that cut the word out of reruns of that film.

The ugly syllables have such a power to shock that I can even (just) see why a city hall employee in Washington DC was forced out of his job (and later rehired after a scandal) for quite innocently using the word ‘niggardly’, which has no racial meaning at all. This really happened, in 1999. The man’s name was David Howard.

Knowing what I know of the bitter racial past and present of America’s unofficially but sharply segregated capital city, I think he would have been wiser and more tactful to say ‘miserly’.

This is because we have all made this word into a sort of boundary marker between our ignorant past and our more enlightened present.

But the word itself is not the offence. It is the intention behind it that we should judge. Those who speak crude words with no other aim than to wound and insult should face strong disapproval. Now, perhaps we could apply the same rule to the ‘F’ word and the ‘C’ word, which you can use on the BBC without getting into any trouble at all these days.

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04 May 2014 12:01 AM

Marriage died last week after a long illness. There will still be weddings, of course. But they won’t mean anything any more. They’ll be like those certificates saying you are ‘Lord of the Manor’ which gullible Americans buy.

The whole point of marriage was that it was binding for life – ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part’.

That is what made it such a fortress against other influences. The State couldn’t break into it. It was a small, private place where we were sovereign over our own lives.

Either you like this or you don’t. I believe that raising children as well as we can is the central purpose of our lives. I also think that lifelong marriage is the best way of doing it, and of ensuring that we do not run away from it, as many of us are inclined to do.

I also think the greatest test of character most of us will face will come when a husband or wife falls ill and becomes dependent on us. Marriage, by leaving us no choice in this, actually makes it easier.

But in the late 1960s, Britain and most other Western countries introduced divorce laws that hollowed out the marriage oath.

Since then, if either spouse wishes to break the solemn marriage promise, the State and the law actively take that spouse’s side.

If the other half of the marriage wishes to stay married, he or she can in the end be removed from the home by force, with the threat of prison.

I am still amazed that this totalitarian change came about with so little protest.

Now the very sharp and influential Sir James Munby, senior judge in the English family courts, has said that couples should be able to end a marriage simply by signing a form at a register office, with no need for lawyers or judges.

And, being smart, he has also urged the next obvious step – that cohabiting couples should be treated as if they are officially married once they have stayed together for a couple of years.

After all, why not? There’s no important difference any more. Official forms long ago stopped referring to ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, and those who cling to these archaic terms are frequently told by bureaucrats that they are now in fact ‘partners’.

I think Sir James will get his wish. And everyone will be happy, happy, happy – except the growing multitude of children who have never known domestic security and now never will, and the lonely, confused old men and women with nowhere to turn but the doubtful comforts of the care home, where their lives can dribble away in a medicated haze, perhaps punctuated by slaps and insults.

Another BBC series that needs subtitles (but this time they have a good excuse)

Since even home-made BBC productions need subtitles these days, I am surprised the Corporation hasn’t been making more of its powerful new German-made mini-series on the Second World War as experienced by ‘normal’ Germans.

By the time you read this, you’ll probably have already missed two episodes of Generation War but it’s well worth catching up on iPlayer, or perhaps they could repeat it soon. It convulsed Germany when it was shown there last year.

It also infuriated Poles, who reasonably thought that it wasn’t for the Germans, of all people, to remind them that quite a lot of Poles had been anti-Semites.

But it’s worth seeing for lots of reasons. First, it is simply good TV, never boring, full of incident, some of it horrible, some of it deeply unlikely, but all of it interesting.

If you think modern Germans have fully confronted the horrors of the Hitler era, this drama will show you how very wrong you are. They’ve barely begun.

This helps to explain Berlin’s continuing desire to advance coyly behind the smokescreen of the European Union rather than under its own flag. You might also notice that the film completely ignores the first two years of the war, and only begins with the invasion of, er, Ukraine.

One simple question will tell us all we need to know about drugs

I see that even the slow learners in the media are at last picking up on the mountains of reputable research which show that ‘antidepressants’ are vastly over-prescribed even on their own terms, often have unpleasant side effects, and may not actually be any more effective against ‘depression’ than sugar pills.

Others all eventually follow where this column has led for years, though, of course, they never admit it.

So here’s a new challenge for the slow learners. I cannot see how anyone can oppose it. Can we please now have a simple rule for all coroners, magistrates and judges?

Wherever someone has taken his own life, or wherever someone is accused of taking someone else’s life, or of an act of dangerous violence, the police, doctors and pathologists involved should be required to discover whether that person has ever been a user of mind-altering drugs, whether legally prescribed, or illegal.

I believe that if this question is asked, it will become plain that there is a frightening correlation between such drugs and such acts. Then, at last, we can do something.

Have you noticed how the BBC discusses UKIP as if it is a problem rather than a legitimate party? Have you observed the pathetic attempts of Tory spin-doctors (who can think of nothing to say in favour of their own organisation) to smear UKIP from morn till night?

Have you also noticed the slavish obedience of political journalists, who have spent the past ten years ignoring the biggest issues in British politics – the EU and immigration – but now recycle these trivial slanders in the hope that they can save the old, dying parties which have spoon-fed them all their stories?

This sort of ganging up has not worked on the Scots, who understandably grow fonder of independence with every stupid threat and falsehood. I have a feeling it’s not going to work on the English either – and in case you hadn’t noticed by now, Nigel Farage is in fact England’s answer to Alex Salmond.

If anyone is charged, tried and convicted for the murder of Jean McConville during the Irish Troubles, what will happen to that person? If I have correctly understood the 1998 Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act, my belief is that he or she would serve a maximum prison sentence of two years. When I asked the Northern Ireland Office if I was right, they issued a panicky refusal to comment.

27 April 2014 12:01 AM

It hurts me to say it, but the grisly gang of anti-God professors and authors are right, and David Cameron is wrong. This is not a Christian country any more. Actually, I suspect the Prime Minister knows this quite well, as he and his Nasty Party have never done anything to defend the national religion from its attackers.

It is of course possible that Mr Cameron is genuinely pulsing with the power of the Holy Ghost. But it is hard to forget that he is also trying to defend his flanks against UKIP, and to win back some of the ex-Tories who defected over same-sex marriage.

Then there’s the problem of his children’s education. His well-publicised attendance at a London church miles from his home has helped him and one of his senior colleagues to insert their young into one of the best primary schools in England.

Too bad for any children of poor Christian parents who couldn’t get in because the school is crammed with Tory infants.

Of course Mr Cameron could afford a private school, but since the Tory Party was taken over by left-wingers, its leaders, like Labour’s, have to pretend to love the state system

Now, I know nothing of the inner mind of our nation’s Premier, but I can think of few things less Christian than to use outward displays of faith to gain material or political advantages for yourself, especially if you do so at the expense of the poor.

Before he began doing God, Mr Cameron declined to criticise ‘middle-class parents with sharp elbows’, praising them as ‘active citizens’. This was presumably at one of those moments when his religion was fading out, ‘like Magic FM in the Chilterns’, rather than fading in.

Now, neither Mr Cameron nor Mr Blair, nor even Harold Wilson (who launched the Cultural Revolution) or Margaret Thatcher (who fought so hard to abolish the Christian Sabbath), can be blamed for destroying the Christian church in this country.

It bayoneted itself in the heart by supporting the First World War when it should have used every sinew to stop it. The Church in this country and all of Europe has never recovered.

But both parties have kicked Christianity when it was down. Their joint support for easy divorce effectively cancelled the Church of England’s marriage oath, in which husband and wife swore to remain together for life.

Their joint backing for abortion on demand undid one of the greatest advances made by Christian civilisation, which ended the pagan practice of murdering unwanted children.

They quietly allowed the teaching of Christianity as the national religion to disappear (illegally) from hundreds of state schools. Religion is now taught instead as a sort of oddity which other people do, and which you can laugh at provided they are not Muslims, who must be treated with respect in case they get angry. Pupils are now ignorant of the faith that formed their nation, but are force-fed green propaganda, and dangerously bad advice about sex and drugs.

But above all, there was Harriet Harman’s 2010 Equality Act, which was actually an EU Directive. If the Tories had been in office at the time, they would have passed it themselves. This turned the pursuit of ‘equality’ into our new national belief system, alongside the closely related commitment to ‘human rights’.

It is not just that these ideas are quite different from the Christian beliefs in authority, duty, self-restraint and conscience that used to govern our law and life.

They are actively hostile to an established Church. For they ban any ‘discrimination’ on the grounds of religion. And that means that the law cannot discriminate in favour of the Christian faith – a change many radical judges welcome.

In practice, of course, it also means that Islam, which brooks no mockery or disrespect, grows strong while the gentler voice of Anglicanism grows fainter and fainter until it is blown away on the breeze. You wait and see.

But for now, until the church is turned into a mosque or a bar, the faith schools are still jolly good, if you can wangle your sons and daughters into them.

He is a bit silly sometimes, but Charles is our best hope

I can remember when there was no political advertising on public transport at all. Now a great deal of such advertising has a political message of one sort or another, so why the censorship, on the London Underground, of the Almeida Theatre’s striking poster for its play about what will happen when Prince Charles becomes King?

I think it’s genuine fear of an unavoidable national crisis, myself. I have long predicted (and in a way hoped for) a clash between Charles and the Government when he eventually comes to the throne. When it arrives, many who now fashionably despise the Monarchy will find themselves unexpectedly siding with him.

The Prince is silly on some things (warmism especially) but in most matters he is far closer to the nation’s heart and soul than the political class. And he has just as much of a moral claim to speak for us.

Think about it. It’s the party machines, not us, who actually choose MPs in safe seats, and then boss them around. And it’s money from rather fishy billionaires that pays for their campaigns, and they expect their reward. Whereas the heir to throne is nobody’s creature, and hasn’t sold himself to the highest bidder.

It is amazing that the Blair Creature does not grasp how much he is despised, especially by those who once admired him. He has taken to making speeches about doing good in the Middle East, where his Iraq policy helped to ruin the lives of millions for decades to come.

It also cost this country billions we could not afford, not to mention 179 British lives.

I still think the only way for him to regain our respect would be to take a vow of lifelong silence in a very austere monastery, where he could perhaps clean the lavatories. But he still thinks he was right, and many of his accomplices also still walk around as if they had done nothing wrong.

It is a gigantic scandal that Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq War, which ceased taking evidence three years ago, has yet to be published. Who is holding it up and why? Is it frontbench collusion between the parties? If Parliament is any use at all, it will force publication this year.

There is nothing at all ‘racist’ in UKIP’s election posters. Those who use the word simply prove that the expression has become nothing more than an empty smear. What’s wrong with the placards is that they just aren’t very good.

In the crowded pedestrian zone of a prosperous Home Counties town, I politely asked a heedless cyclist to dismount. He ploughed on. I grew slightly less polite, and – to my joy – won the support of two other citizens, who eventually forced the lawbreaker to stop. There were, of course, no police officers to be seen. At this point a group of tattooed, pierced young men joined in, on the side of the cyclist. We had infringed his human rights, or something.

It could have turned nasty, and nearly did. But what struck me is that there is now no guaranteed majority on the side of goodness in public places. And there might soon be a majority for wickedness.

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29 March 2014 12:20 PM

In answer to various comments, I am quite aware that Russia has been a predatory power in the past - and indeed fear that if we are stupid enough in our approach to it, it will become one again.

But then so were we, and so was France, and so was Germany, and so was the USA, and so is China. This is the nature of real life. The intelligent thing to do is not to moralise about it, but to reach intelligent, cynical compromises about it that will not lead to war. Hence Versailles was very moral, and killed millions, whereas the treaties that ended the Napoleonic wars were not moral, and endured peacefully for a century . The Cold War settlement , under which we left the Warsaw Pact countries in Russian chains, was also not moral, but it was realistic.

The 1992 borders imposed on Russia may be moral (I’m not qualified to judge) but even without the Baltics joining NATO (let alone Ukraine and Georgia) they were unrealistic and will not last. You might as well claim to have invented an anti-gravity machine, or to have cured death, as to imagine that such things can be achieved. Do we want to rearrange them in a wise manner, or do we actually want to make them even more unrealistic, so ensuring future conflict? What we can really learn from the inter-war treatment of Germany is that if you don’t make concessions to reasonably civilised governments, you aid their downfall, and so end up making much bigger concessions to uncivilised governments which have replaced them.

In my view, Germany, like Russia, simply exists and its existence (and therefore its basic needs) must be acknowledged. The comment from ‘Jack’ that ‘The root of the problem is that Germany was insufficiently weakened by WWI’ is a great illustration of this absurd view, that you can wish countries out of existence. From 1870 onwards, the rest of Europe should have realised that a united Germany must be accommodated. Silly efforts to resist this inevitability destroyed European civilisation and Christendom in 1914, created the catastrophe of the Russian Revolution, and led directly to the horrors of 1939-45. A similar unwillingness to accept that Russia exists and reasonably desires a cordon sanitaire of non-threatening nations on its borders is equally unrealistic. As I’ve said before, you might as well try to move the Himalayas with a teaspoon as try to create a Europe without German and Russian power.

Mr ‘P’ says that Czechoslovakia wasn’t the point, nor was Poland. This at least removes the sentimentality from the case for war. But what precisely was the ‘principle’ which we would have defended by making Prague a cause of war, and so woefully failed to defend by making Poland a cause of war?

I cannot see it. Imagining that the frontiers of Eastern Europe are a major interest of Britain’s is grossly to exaggerate our importance in Europe (as we tend to do). To the extent that we had any interest at all, I should have thought it lay in hoping Germany would turn East rather than West, which was in any case likely.